Posts Tagged ‘revenge’

Nearly a week into January and I’m just now getting up my first Vintage Science Fiction post? What is the world coming to? Thank you to everyone who is participating in Vintage Science Fiction Month, make sure you link back to your posts in the comments of the Vintage Scifi tab up top so everyone can find everything. On twitter? follow @VintageSciFi_ and #VintageSciFiMonth for Vintage goodness all month long!

I may have gotten started a little late, but wow this first novel I read for Vintage Month was incredible!!

Mouse grew in up a traditional culture that didn’t encourage pilot training or getting cybernetic plugs. Raised in the school of hard knocks, he often stole to eat. His prized possession is a rare musical instrument that produces not only sound but also images and scent. Lorq Von Ray’s youth was the opposite of Mouse’s in every possible way. A child of wealth and privilege, he knew from a young age he’d be inheriting a business that controlled half the transportation of the known galaxy.

When an aged, scarred, and obsessed Captain Von Ray plunges into a portside bar looking for a crew for a trip that if successful could mean fame, infamy, societal disruption, or more likely death for everyone involved, Mouse signs up. The Captain doesn’t explicitly say this is a trip designed around a long game of revenge, but those who listen closely, those who know where that disfiguring scar came from, they know.

What is Nova? It is a quest story, a revenge story, a coming of age story, it’s the edge of every ending simply being another beginning. It sounds overweight and dangerously ambitious, but it reads smooth and weightless. The plot feels narrow at first, but it expands like a light cone, pulling in what it needs, and easily setting aside what it doesn’t. And there is plenty in this book that isn’t in this book – what I mean by that is Delany has put a lot of subplot between the lines. The glances characters give each other, the words they don’t use. It’s hard to believe this novel is less than 250 pages long!

The plot never sprawls, but the possibilities of everything else that happens and may happen to these characters just outside the confines of this story are endless. The main characters are fully fleshed out, and even side characters are given just enough screen time that you start filling in the blanks of their lives yourself. For instance, I know there is so much more to Tyy, and I’d love to learn more about the twins and their other brother.

I loved everything about Nova, I don’t even know where to start talking about it. So I’ll just start, and hopefully this all makes sense.

Von Ray’s rag-tag crew is a lot of fun, they put me in mind a little bit of the TV show Farscape. Mouse and his shipmate Katin are perfect foils for each other, Katin reminds me of one of the nerdy guys on The Big Bang Theory, Mouse is the wide eyed kid going on his first Star Run. These two bond over being the least strange members of Captain Von Ray’s crew.

Whatever you expect this book to be, or to be about, it isn’t. The blurb on the back is fairly useless, making it sound like an action packed revenge story with some magic. I’ll give it that, it is a revenge story, and there is some magic. But at the core, The Diviner is the story of a family who was nearly destroyed, and instead, irrevocably changed the world.

Long review short, Melanie Rawn’s The Diviner is so full of awesome that I don’t even know where to start talking about it. Complex and sprawling, subtle yet epic, The Diviner offers stunning world building, an elegant magic system, and characters who I swear I just spent an endless summer with. Doesn’t hurt that Rawn’s writing style is poetic yet purposeful, layered like sheer silks that shift and billow in the breeze, offering momentary glimpses of a larger pattern.

The Diviner is all about the details – details that support other details, that are required to make something else work, yet like a cathedral or a fractal, the complexities blend into the background at first blush. There’s so much I want to touch on, that trying to review this book is like trying to review Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. It would be so much easier if this review could just consist of “you have to read this book!” over and over again until I reach 800 words.

Spanning four generations, the pacing of The Diviner is very fast, but the point of the book requires that time pass quickly. When months or years pass between chapters, we’re often given a passage written by a chronicler who has documented what happened. The chroniclers are just one more subtle architectural detail, it’s easy to see they each have their own style but were trained in the same school. This method of showing the passage of time may not work for all readers, but I found it refreshing and enjoyable.

Take Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and put it far in the future. A future where a walled Paris is one of the few habitable places left on Earth and the moon has been fully colonized. A future where the rich marry for political reasons and machinations and everyone else just tries to get by as best they can. A future where the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Loosely following the original material, yet told from the point of view of the overly naive Albert, Gankustuou: The Count of Monte Cristo is as visually stunning as it is fascinating. This is an anime that you want to watch because it is well written, well voiced, and simply beautiful to behold. The fact that you’ll be digging around for old Dumas titles afterwards is just an added bonus.

An oversimplified summary of the original story goes thusly: shortly before the sailor Edmond Dantes is to marry Mercedes, he is betrayed by Fernand, a rival for Mercedes. Dantes is imprisoned in the Chateau d’If, and Fernand marries Mercedes. During his imprisonment, Dantes befriends a fellow prisoner who claims to know of a buried treasure. When Dantes escapes the Chateau, he finds the treasure, and returns to Paris. It’s been 15 years, and Mercedes and Fernand have a son, named Albert. Introducing himself as the Count of Monte Cristo, Dantes plans his revenge on the man who destroyed his life, a slow revenge that is as beautiful as it is brutal.Read the rest of this entry »

FTC Stuff

some of the books reviewed here were free ARCs supplied by publishers/authors/other groups. Some of the books here I got from the library. the rest I *gasp!* actually paid for. I'll do my best to let you know what's what.